Iran’s Disputed Election Sparks Massive Protests, North Korea Tests a Nuclear Device, Sri Lanka Defeats the Tamil Tigers and the Global Recession Deepens

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 July 2009 | Reporting Period: 3 April – 2 July 2009

Quarterly Briefing

• Iran holds its presidential election on June 12; official results declare Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner with 63 per cent of the vote; opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and millions of his supporters reject the result as fraudulent; massive street protests — the largest in Iran since the 1979 revolution — are met with lethal force by the regime’s Basij militia; dozens are killed, hundreds arrested, and the reformist media suppressed; the Green Movement is born.
• North Korea conducts its second nuclear test on May 25, detonating a device of significantly higher yield than its 2006 test; the UN Security Council passes Resolution 1874 in June, imposing tighter sanctions including cargo inspection rights; North Korea responds by declaring it will weaponise its plutonium stockpile and reprocess spent fuel rods.
• Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war ends on May 18 when government forces kill LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran and capture the last rebel territory on the northern coast; the final offensive killed tens of thousands of civilians in a narrow strip along with the guerrilla fighters; the victory raises questions about the fate of 280,000 Tamil civilians interned in government camps.
• President Obama delivers his Cairo speech on June 4, offering a “new beginning” in US relations with the Muslim world; the address, to an audience at Cairo University, represents the most direct attempt by an American president to reset the post-9/11 relationship with Muslim-majority societies; its reception is cautiously hopeful in Arab and Islamic public opinion.
• The global recession intensifies in its second year; US unemployment reaches 9.5 per cent in June; General Motors files for bankruptcy on June 1, the fourth-largest corporate bankruptcy in US history; the IMF projects global GDP will contract by 1.4 per cent in 2009, the first global recession since the Second World War.
• Chrysler’s managed bankruptcy and Fiat acquisition completes in June; the Obama administration’s aggressive intervention in the auto industry signals a new phase of state capitalism in the United States that has echoes across the developing world’s debates about how to respond to economic crisis.

Prologue: Revolution Suppressed and War Concluded

The second quarter of 2009 brought two events of historical significance within a month of each other: the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in May, and the eruption of Iran’s Green Movement in June. Both involved the suppression of a civilian population by a state using military force; both produced international protests about human rights; and both posed questions about the international community’s capacity and willingness to impose costs on governments for internal conduct. Sri Lanka’s government argued, with some success in the corridors of the UN Human Rights Council, that it had simply won a war against a terrorist organisation. Iran’s government argued that it had correctly announced an election result and was now dealing with foreign-inspired disorder. Neither argument was fully convincing; neither was entirely without substance. For the Caribbean, the Iranian election’s crisis mattered primarily through its effect on oil prices and regional geopolitical alignments; the Sri Lankan war’s end carried both relief at the conclusion of a decades-long conflict and concern about its humanitarian aftermath.

Iran: The Election and Its Aftermath

The speed with which Iran’s Interior Ministry announced Ahmadinejad’s victory — barely two hours after polls closed, with a claimed margin of 11 million votes — was what first alerted Mousavi’s campaign team that something was wrong. Exit polls, voter intention surveys and the simple arithmetic of turnout in Mousavi’s strongholds did not support the official result. Within days, perhaps three million people had gathered on Tehran’s Azadi Street in the largest demonstration in Iranian history. The images of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, shot and dying on a Tehran street circulated globally and gave the protest movement an instantly recognisable martyr.

The regime’s response was characteristically measured in tactical terms: it avoided direct military intervention against protesters but deployed the Basij paramilitary force with batons, teargas and live ammunition against smaller groups; it arrested hundreds of reformist politicians, journalists and academics; it shut down foreign media and internet services to limit the global visibility of the crackdown. By the end of June, the street protests had declined in frequency though not in the intensity of popular anger that produced them. The Green Movement had not been extinguished; it had gone underground.

North Korea’s Nuclear Escalation

North Korea’s second nuclear test was more powerful than its first and more politically defiant in its timing: it came weeks after the UN Security Council had condemned a long-range missile test in April. The message was one of deliberate escalation: the Kim Jong-il government was demonstrating that sanctions, diplomatic pressure and the Six-Party Talks process had not changed its strategic calculus. The response — Resolution 1874’s tighter sanctions — was the sharpest multilateral response to a North Korean provocation to date, but its enforceability was limited by the unwillingness of China, which supplies most of North Korea’s energy and food, to impose costs severe enough to threaten regime stability.

The Recession and Caribbean Economic Vulnerability

The global recession’s second year was proving harder for the Caribbean than the first. The first year saw primarily financial sector disruptions; the second brought their full translation into unemployment, reduced consumer spending and collapsing trade. Caribbean tourism — the primary source of GDP for most island economies — was experiencing a significant decline in US visitor numbers as American households cut discretionary spending. Remittance flows from the Jamaican diaspora in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada were declining with diaspora employment rates; for many Jamaican families, remittances represented the difference between meeting and not meeting basic expenses. The IMF was in discussions with several Caribbean governments, including Jamaica, about emergency support arrangements.

Looking Ahead

Iran’s Green Movement may resurface in the autumn as the regime’s initial repression is absorbed and organised opposition reconstitutes itself; the trajectory of the nuclear dispute — already complicated by the election crisis — will need reassessment by Western governments. North Korea has declared its intention to weaponise its plutonium; the Six-Party Talks framework appears to have collapsed; the question of what to do next has no obvious answer. The global recession will reach its trough — most economists believe — sometime in the second half of 2009; Caribbean recovery depends on how quickly US consumer confidence and visitor spending recovers. And Honduras, whose president was removed by the military in the early hours of June 28 — just after our reporting period ends — has produced a constitutional crisis that will dominate Latin American and Caribbean diplomacy in the months ahead.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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